The Way of Jayne, Part 4

Six months had gone by since Ma Cobb had been delivered of the demons that had plagued her mind. A freed mind enabled the body to get back up and out of the rocking chair she’d been living in for too long. She hadn’t been an invalid even while in her self-made bondage, more of a prisoner of her own lack of will to live, but her friend and midwife Maeve Burlee had provided a conduit to break the shackles, had let her get back to being a mother to the Cobb children, a member of the community and a healthy human being again.

Marie Cobb stretched her arms high overhead, arched her back and issued a big old sigh. She had just finished feeding the one year old triplets, Peter, Mary and Paul. They were lively and quick, sure squirmers, but the restraining trays on the Shaker-like bench that Jayne and Timmie had fashioned for their mealtimes was a help, keeping them pent up long enough to get them to eat at least a handful of whatever was put before them.

At this age they still ate with their hands, of course, pink dimpled fingers slapping at the mashed carrots and chicken or swirling it on their trays. The Picassoan orange and beige palette was wasted on their doting mom’s non-artistic eye, but she smiled and encouraged them to, “Come on, y’all. Put some of them groceries in your mouth, please, for momma.”

Googles and hollers of “Ma-ma-ma,” or “Dowg,” “Bird,” or “Peeese,?” (for ‘please’,) were intermittently punctuated by grunting baby mumblings whenever a child decided to temporarily appease his mother by transferring a small amount of food/paint from tray to inside a cupid’s bow mouth.

Jayne clomped up the front stairs banging his boots hard on each step to dislodge thickly clotted mudballs. Timmie tromped right behind him clomping her boots likewise with the added necessary maneuver of dodging Jayne’s clumpy missiles, some of which could be large enough to make her trip.

He looked behind him at her progress as he held to the porch post on the top step. When h